Friday, August 8, 2014

WAR (Wins Above Replacement) and wRC+: can they be explained?

WAR between no school and new school: cease fire. You really smart guys need to educate the rest of us. This is yet another reason field managers should not be former players and why Brian Kenny should stop badgering former players like Mark DeRosa on MLB Network about stuff like wRC+.

I’m a smart guy. I understand baseball and really enjoy the numbers, even those on the uniforms. I like playing with the numbers. However, my math skills are largely confined to arithmetic. I am not a statistician or operations research person. Those are the really smart guys who have come up with the new stuff in recent years. So declaring war on them or their concepts is useless for me. I need to confine my concerns to common sense things.There are two things about WAR for non-pitchers that should be examined:1. WAR is a total, not an average2. defensive WAR, more properly called fielding WAR, is suspect. The more the really smart guys delve into fielding stats in general the more they see a need to develop more methods of measurement.
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